These 19 former Facebook employees are now leading some of the hottest enterprise tech startups

Honeycomb co-founder and CEO Charity Majors first came to Facebook through an acquisition.

Originally, she and co-founder Christine Yen worked for a mobile backend startup called Parse. When Facebook acquired Parse in 2013, Majors, who spent most of her career working for startups, had mixed feelings about coming to such a large company.

"I was more of a startup person, but I loved my startup and I loved my team," Majors told Business Insider. "...I learned a lot of Facebook, but there were things I never wanted to learn, like management and bureaucracy. It was not viable for me. You don't get to do anything interesting. You're a small cog. Your work often gets thrown away or it never gets shipped."

At Facebook, Majors often used a tool called Scuba, which helps with analyzing sets of data.

"The time it took to answer these questions, it dropped like rocks," Majors said. "It went from hours if not days to seconds. It was not an engineering problem. It was a platform problem."

After leaving Facebook, she decided to start a company in 2016 that helps users monitor and understand the inner workings of their systems – an extension of what she appreciated about Scuba. Now, Honeycomb has raised a total of $15.5 million.

Read more: How this startup CEO became a secret weapon for star Valley engineers

Majors makes it a point to hire a diverse team with a variety of work backgrounds, rather than just engineers from companies like Facebook and Google. For example, they also hired bootcamp graduates or other people who may have been overlooked at other companies.

"We very philosophically wanted to believe that the best teams are not always made of the best engineers but people who could learn and become a team together and process their mistakes in a way that's not personal or damaging to people," Majors said. "I'm not going to say the bar was lower, but it was a different bar."

To this day, Majors says it's the best team she's ever been on.

"[Honeycomb employees] support each other and they don't work crazy hours," Majors said. "We have a distributed work culture. They go home at night. They take trips. They're not burning themselves out."

When Matin Movassate quit Facebook in 2012 to start his own company, he didn't tell his parents for fear they'd try and talk him out of it.

"When I made the jump, I didn't tell my parents, because I knew if I tried to talk with them they would probably argue with me, 'hey, stay at the job a little longer, see it through the IPO,'" he recalled. "It's a very logical case, but I knew in my gut I wouldn't be happier there."

Movassate is now cofounder and CEO of Heap, an analytics startup. As a product manager at Facebook, he had found it frustrating to manage the social network's user analytics, helping inspire him to find a better way.

"When working on these products, you need to use analytics to understand if your products work," he said of his time at Facebook. "We ship features constantly ... how are users engaging with these features?" But the status quo meant it could take "weeks or months to get answers to even simple questions."

Today, Heap has 120 employees and 7,000 customers, from big businesses to individual developers.

Sarah Hum, along with cofounder and partner Andrew Rasmussen, is a cofounder of Canny — software that companies can use to solicit and organize feedback from their customers and users.

After two internships at Facebook, she joined full-time as a product designer in June 2015, working on the Messenger team before going full-time on Canny — a project she originally started under a different name while at school — a little over a year and a half later. Rasmussen, meanwhile, was one of the early engineers on React Native, the popular app programming framework that originated at Facebook.

Facebook was “a great way for me as a product designer to get my foot in the door” and “get dirty,” Hum said, but “I think I always knew I wanted to do my own thing.”

Today, Canny is entirely bootstrapped and profitable, with five employees — including the two cofounders — and 400 paying customers. And it’s fully remote: Rasmussen and Hum have been traveling the world for the last year and a half; when we spoke, they were in Seville, Spain.

Gem CTO Nick Bushak had to help quickly hire and build a large team when he was at Facebook. Inspired by this, in 2017, he got together with Gem CEO Steve Bartel, previously of Dropbox, to start a company focused on solving this problem. They wanted to bring to more companies the best practices at Facebook and Dropbox, which use relatively advanced customer relationship management (CRM) software to handle the recruiting pipeline.

"At Facebook when I was there, recruiting was a well-oiled metrics-driven machine," Bushak told Business Insider. "That's largely because Facebook had the resources to put engineers into building recruiting software. Only a couple companies like Facebook and Google have the resources to build CRM like that."

Bushak and Bartel, who met at MIT, worked to build a software platform that helps companies build relationships with talent.

It's somewhat like LinkedIn, though . On the other hand, Gem helps companies build relationships with candidates once they figure out who they might want to hire.

"Once you know the people you want to hire, companies should want to build relationships with those people over time," Bushak said. "That's where we come in. We're not trying to build a database of people that companies use to find people they might be interested in finding."

Gem just closed $9 million in a Series A round in March. In total, it has raised $11 million and has about 30 employees. It already has about 100 paying customers, including Dropbox, Pinterest, and Slack.

Read more: These former engineers from Dropbox and Facebook just got $9 million to help companies recruit better candidates

"When we were thinking of starting the company, we were ready to hit a tough endeavor," Bushak said. "We're so fortunate in that we hit on something that's a real issue."

During her time at Facebook, two of the future founders of Interana observed that a big secret to the social network's success was its deep knowledge about how its users interacted with the site. And so, in 2013,

In 2013, CTO Bobby Johnson co-founded the company with CEO Ann Johnson and Lior Abraham to build a tool that helps companies understand customer behavior.

At Facebook, Johnson and Abraham were on the infrastructure team, which scales the site and makes sure it's performing well. There, he helped build a data analytics tool called Scuba. Johnson recalls that at Facebook, when it was still competing with other social media sites like MySpace, the company realized that the way to win was to understand its users better.

"Specifically, I had seen how big a difference looking at this data made, how much more successful Facebook was by looking at this data," Johnson told Business Insider. "It was really clear it was a massive opportunity to do that. Every business should be looking at the world this way."

When he left Facebook, Johnson was ready for something new, and he wanted a new challenge. He launched Interana with the help of the Y Combinator, a startup incubator program that gave it access to a network of investors. It now has 65 employees and has raised $46 million.

One of the biggest challenges, Johnson said, is transitioning from working in a consumer business to an enterprise business. For example, he and his co-founders needed to learn how enterprise sales works.

With enterprise software, the company needs to better cater to specific customers, which differs from Facebook's approach. Facebook might not work to appease specific customers, but rather, listens to its customers based on the data it collects.

"At Facebook, you have a billion users," Johnson said. "Any user who wants a thing, you don't care about. If a million users want it, then you care. In enterprise, you might have a single customer, if that business is important enough, you make changes to satisfy a specific thing.

What's more, at Facebook, there was a "Move fast, break things" mentality," but enterprise software needs to not break, Johnson says.

"At Facebook, you can get away with breaking the experience for a lot of people, but in enterprise, you just can't do that," Johnson said. "There are people who directly pay you money for these features. You have to actually listen to your customers."

Qubole cofounders Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma joined Facebook early on, and circa 2007, had to help re-envision what Facebook's data platform should look like. What they built would be used to drive the growth of Facebook's business.

"At the time Facebook was not the juggernaut it was today," Thusoo told Business Insider. "Facebook was much more of a product company. Data had not entered into the equation of how to design products."

Thusoo realized that it was difficult for even a large company like Facebook to build a modern data platform, even with all its resources. But it would be even harder for most companies. With that in mind, he decided he wanted to help companies build platforms they could use to securely process data, even if they aren't as large as Facebook or Google.

They started the cloud data platform company Qubole in 2011 after leaving Facebook.

"The key thing for us was at Facebook, we were very lucky to get a front row seat of what data can do for a company," Thusoo said. "If you envision a platform, how that can help the company be data-driven and drive that innovation stream? One was to keep building this for Facebook and keep moving the bar up for Facebook...We felt that we wanted to make an impact on bringing that platform to everyone else."

Now, Qubole is working with customers like Expedia. It has 350 employees and has raised $87 million.

Thusoo still admires the "Move fast, break things" mentality at Facebook and calls the social network a "trendsetter."

"The culture [at Facebook] was very open," Thusoo said. "There was a sense of energy and purpose in the company. These were a lot of empowerment in the company. Nobody asked us to build a platform. We envisioned it. It was a very visionary thing at the time, and a very bold thing to build out the data platform at the time."

Last November, the search and analytics startup Rockset came out of stealth.

Its CEO Venkat Venkataramani and CTO Dhruba Borthakur previously worked at Facebook managing its online data infrastructure. But Venkataramani says he left because he started to get too comfortable. Months after he left Facebook, he decided to launch a startup in 2016 that makes it easy for companies to build data products.

"To make myself uncomfortable again was why I chose to leave my job," Venkataramani told Business Insider. "When I left, I had an understanding of what problems are important to solve."

Venkataramani says that since Rocket's launch, he has been "very, very happy" to see the reception from the market. Right now, the company is focusing on product development, recruitment, and scaling its business.

In March, it just launched a cloud service that allows developers and data scientists to work with complex data sets. It has 17 employees and has raised $21.5 million.

Read more: Here's how two engineers used what they learned at Facebook to come out of nowhere with $21.5 million in funding for their new startup

"I want to help developers and data centers out there unleash their creativity and make it amazing to build products," Venkataramani said. "We're allowing modern enterprises to leverage data and build amazing products and engaging products for their customers and help thousands of companies out there."

Many former Facebook employees-turned-entrepreneurs are first-time founders — but not Giovanni Coglitore.

He launched his first company, Rackable Systems, more than a decade before he ever joined Mark Zuckerberg's rapidly growing empire in 2015. And after leaving in 2015 amid a family tragedy, he started yet another startup that was subsequently acquired by Sony. Finally, in 2017, he kicked things off with his current venture: RStor.

The 45-employee startup helps companies knit the various cloud services they use together into a cohesive package and connect to supercomputing centers. It's taken $45 million in outside funding since its inception, and has customers across the defence, retails, life sciences, and entertainment sectors.

At Facebook, Coglitore was on the infrastructure side of things, ultimately running the hardware engineering team during the early days of the Open Compute Project.

"When I joined Facebook, it was a very interesting place to have the honour to work at. You were at the top of your game, to get a job there — it was probably one of the hardest jobs on the planet to get, and the cast of characters were unbelievably competitive," he recalled. "There was a buzz of, we were invincible, we could do anything."

He credits the company with teaching him the value of employee perks: At Rackable Systems, they'd been prudent and frugal, but Facebook's "audacious" spending on employee benefits like free food and on-campus amenities meant "people collaborate literally every moment they're there," and he's since incorporated that attitude into his latest two companies.

He cautioned against would-be founders against simply using their workplace as a stepping stone to creating their own venture: "Have you accomplished your goal where you're currently at? I think it's wrong to leverage a company for your own self-purpose or interest."

Until his departure in 2016, Tim Campos served as Facebook’s chief information officer.

Today, as CEO of scheduling startup Woven, Campos is trying to help users manage their own information better with an app that syncs with users’ calendars and emails to plan their days.

"It’s kind of like a mashup of what would happen if Google Docs, Google Maps, and Google Calendar all got married,” he previously said.

After years working under the radar, he publicly launched the business in November 2018 with cofounder Burc Arpat, also a Facebook alumni who is now Woven’s CTO. Leaving Facebook in 2016 — “before all this stuff went south” — was a hard decision, Campos said: “It looked like Facebook was going ot take over the universe. To walk away from that for the opportunity to do a startup like Woven is risky, was really, really hard.”

Right now, the company is targeted at individual users, but the company is interested in selling the product to companies as well, and has started thinking about a new investment round to fund that push.

Based in Mountain View, California, it has about a dozen employees, and $4.8 million in seed funding.

At Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg had a mission for Avinash Lakshman: Figure out a way to let users search their messsages.

In trying to tackle this, the software engineer ended up building Cassandra — an open-source database that would go on to great popularity with developers.

In 2011, after four years at Facebook, Lakshman took his learnings from his time at Facebook and struck out on his own, founding Hedvig, a data management startup.

“I felt like the stuff I had built … gave me the right tools to go and fundamentally disrupt the data management space,” he said.

Nearly seven years later, and Hedvig has 50 employees, and has raised $52 million in external funding. It’s not yet profitable, but "we’re getting there," he says.

To others considering diving into entrepreneurship, his advice is simple: "Get comfortable being uncomfortable."

He added: “There’s going to be lots of ups, lots of downs … surround yourself with people who are smarter and more knowledgeable.”

Rousseau Kazi's entrepreneurial spirit has brought him into direct competition with his former employer.

The former Facebook manager is now the CEO of Threads, a workplace app for helping businesses' employees communicate — in much the same way as Workplace, Facebook's enterprise offering.

Kazi first joined Facebook as an intern fresh from college (Berkley, where he studied Computer Science) in 2011, and was there for six solid years, finally leaving in April 2017 to cofound Threads.

He and the team quietly developed it for the next two years, before formally unveiling the business in February 2019 — at the same time announcing it has taken $11.5 million in funding, from Sequoia Capital and others.

The CEO argues Threads is distinct from Workplace because it was built specifically for professional interactions, while its bigger rival is essentially a retooled and reskinned version of Facebook's core app. Early customers include corporate credit card startup Brex and beauty company Glossier.

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